From both Helen and Jennie letters reached the girl of the Red Mill quite frequently. Ruth saw that always her correspondence was opened and read by the censor; but that was the fate of all letters that came to Clair.
“We innocents,” said the matron of the hospital, “are thus afflicted because of the plague of spies—a veritable Egyptian plague!—that infests this part of my country. Do not be troubled, Mam’zelle Americaine. You are not singled out as though your friendliness to France was questioned.
“And yet there may be those working in the guise of the Red Cross who betray their trust,” the woman added. “I hear of such.”
“Who are they? Where?” Ruth asked eagerly.
“It is said that at Lyse many of the supplies sent to the Red Cross from your great and charitable country, Mam’zelle, have been diverted to private dealers and sold to the citizens. Oh, ourFrench people—some of them—are hungry for the very luxuries that theblessésshould have. If they have money they will spend it freely if good things are to be bought.”
“At Lyse!” repeated Ruth. “Where I came from?”
“Fear not that suspicion rests on you,ma chère amie,” cooed the Frenchwoman. “Indeed, no person in the active service of the Red Cross at Lyse is suspected.”
“Nobody suspected in the supply department?” asked Ruth doubtfully.
“Oh, no! The skirts of all are clear, I understand.”
Ruth said no more, but she was vastly worried by what she had heard. What, really, had taken place at Lyse? If a conspiracy had been discovered for the robbing of the Red Cross Supply Department, were not Mrs. Mantel and Legrand and José engaged in it?
Yet it seemed that the woman in black was not suspected. Ruth tried to learn more of the particulars, but the matron of the Clair hospital did not appear to know more than she had already stated.
Ruth wrote to Clare Biggars immediately, asking about the rumored trouble in their department of the Red Cross at Lyse; but naturally there would be delay before she could receive areply, even if the censor allowed the information to go through the mails.
Meanwhile Clair was shaken all through one day and night by increased artillery fire on the battle front. Never had Ruth Fielding heard the guns roll so terribly. It was as though a continuous thunderstorm shook the heavens and the earth.
The Germans tried to drive back the reserves behind the French trenches with the heaviest barrage fire thus far experienced along this sector, while they sent forward their shock troops to overcome the thin French line in the dugouts.
Here and there the Germans gained a footing in the front line of the French trenches; but always they were driven out again, or captured.
The return barrage from the French guns at last created such havoc among the German troops that what remained of the latter were forced back beyond their own front lines.
The casualties were frightful. News of the raging battle came in with every ambulance to the Clair Hospital. The field hospitals were overcrowded and the wounded were being taken immediately from the dressing stations behind the trenches to the evacuation hospitals, like this of Clair, before being operated upon.
This well-conducted institution, in which Ruth had been busy for so many weeks, became in afew hours a bustling, feverish place, with only half enough nurses and fewer doctors than were needed.
Ruth offered herself to the matron and was given charge of one ward for all of one night, while the surgeons and nurses battled in the operating room and in the dangerous wards, with the broken men who were brought in.
Ruth’s ward was a quiet one. She had already learned what to do in most small emergencies. Besides, these patients were, most of them, well on toward recovery, and they slept in spite of what was going on downstairs.
On this night Clair was astir and alight. The peril of an air raid was forgotten as the ambulances rolled in from the north and east. The soft roads became little better than quagmires for it had rained during a part of the day.
Occasionally Ruth went to an open window and looked down at the entrance to the hospital yard, where the lantern light danced upon the glistening cobblestones. Here the ambulances, one after another, halted, while the stretcher-bearers and guards said but little; all was in monotone. But the steady sound of human voices in dire pain could not be hushed.
Some of the wounded were delirious when they were brought in. Perhaps they were better off.
Nor was Ruth Fielding’s sympathy altogetherfor the wounded soldiers. It was, as well, for these young men who drove the ambulances—who took their lives in their hands a score of times during the twenty-four hours as they forced their ambulances as near as possible to the front to recover the broken men. She prayed for the ambulance drivers.
Hour after hour dragged by until it was long past midnight. There had been a lull in the procession of ambulances for a time; but suddenly Ruth saw one shoot out of the gloom of the upper street and come rushing down to the gateway of the hospital court.
This machine was stopped promptly and the driver leaned forward, waving something in his hand toward the sentinel.
“Hey!” cried a voice that Ruth recognized—none other than that of Charlie Bragg. “Is Miss Fielding still here?”
He asked this in atrocious French, but the sentinel finally understood him.
“I will inquire, Monsieur.”
“Never mind the inquiring business,” declared Charlie Bragg. “I’ve got to be on my way. Iknowshe’s here. Get this letter in to her, will you? We’re taking ’em as far as Lyse now, old man. Nice long roll for these poor fellows who need major operations.”
He threw in his clutch again and the ambulancerocked away. Ruth left the window and ran down to the entrance hall. The sentinel was just coming up the steps with the note in his hand. Before Ruth reached the man she saw that the envelope was stained with blood!
“Oh! Is that forme?” the girl gasped, reaching out for it.
“Quite so, Mam’zelle,” and the man handed it to her with a polite gesture.
Ruth seized it, and, with only half-muttered thanks, ran back to her ward. Her heart beat so for a minute that she felt stifled. She could not imagine what the note could be, or what it was about.
Yet she had that intuitive feeling of disaster that portends great and overwhelming events. Her thought was of Tom—Tom Cameron! Who else would send her a letter from the direction of the battle line?
She sank into her chair by the shaded lamp behind the nurse’s screen. For a time she could not even look at the letter again, with its stain of blood so plain upon it!
Then she brought it into line with her vision and with the lamplight streaming upon it. The bloody finger marks half effaced something that was written upon the face of the envelope in a handwriting strange to Ruth.
“This was found in tunic pocket of an American—badly wounded—evacuated to L——. His identification tag lost, as his arm was torn off at elbow, and no tag around his neck.”
This brief statement was unsigned. Some kindly Red Cross worker, perhaps, had written it. Charlie Bragg must have known that the letter was addressed to Ruth and offered to bring it to her at Clair, the American on whom the letter was found having been unconscious.
The flap on the envelope had not been sealed. With trembling fingers the girl drew the paper forth. Yes! It was in Tom Cameron’s handwriting, and it began: “Dear Ruth Fielding.”
In his usual jovial style the letter proceeded. It had evidently been written just before Tom had been called to active duty in the trenches.
There were no American troops in the battle line, as yet, Ruth well knew. But their officers, in small squads, were being sent forward to learn what it meant to be in the trenches under fire.
And Tom had been caught in this sudden attack! Evacuated to Lyse! The field hospitals, as well as this one at Clair, were overcrowded. It was a long way to take wounded men to Lyse to be operated upon.
“Operated upon!” The thought made Ruthshudder. She turned sick and dizzy. Tom Cameron crippled and unconscious! An arm torn off! A cripple for the rest of his life!
She looked at the bloody fingerprints on the envelope. Tom’s blood, perhaps.
He was being taken to Lyse, where nobody would know him and he would know nobody! Oh, why had it not been his fate to be brought to this hospital at Clair where Ruth was stationed?
There was a faint call from one of the patients. It occurred twice before the girl aroused to its significance.
She must put aside her personal fears and troubles. She was here to attend to the ward while the regular night nurse was engaged elsewhere.
Because Tom Cameron was wounded—perhaps dying—she could not neglect her duty here. She went quietly and brought a drink of cool water to the feverish and restlessblesséwho had called.
The early hours of that morning were the most tedious that Ruth Fielding ever had experienced. She was tied here to the convalescent ward of the Clair Hospital, while her every thought was bent upon that rocking ambulance that might be taking the broken body of Tom Cameron to the great base hospital at Lyse.
Was it possible that Tom was in Charlie Bragg’s car? What might not happen to the ambulance on the dark and rough road over which Ruth had once ridden with the young American chauffeur.
While she was looking out of the window at the ambulance as it halted at the gateway of the hospital court, was poor Tom, unconscious and wounded, in Charlie’s car? Oh! had she but suspected it! Would she not have run down and insisted that Tom be brought in here where she might care for him?
Her heart was wrung by this possibility. She felt condemned that she had not suspected Tom’spresence at the time! Had not felt his nearness to her!
Helen was far away in Paris. Already Mr. Cameron was on the high seas. There was nobody here so close to Tom as Ruth herself. Nor could anybody else do more for him than Ruth, if only she could find him!
The battle clouds and storm clouds both broke in the east with the coming of the clammy dawn. She saw the promise of a fair day just before sunrise; then the usual morning fog shut down, shrouding all the earth about the town. It would be noon before the sun could suck up this moisture.
Two hours earlier than expected the day nurse came to relieve her. Ruth was thankful to be allowed to go. Having spent the night here she would not be expected to serve in her own department that day. Yet she wished to see the matron and put to her a request.
It was much quieter downstairs when she descended. A nodding nurse in the hall told her that every bed and every cot in the hospital was filled. Some of the convalescents would be removed as soon as possible so as to make room for newly wounded poilus.
“But where is the matron?”
“Ah, the good mother has gone to her bed—quite fagged out. Twenty-four hours on herfeet—and she is no longer young. If I can do anything for the Americaine mademoiselle——?”
But Ruth told her no. She would write a note forMadame la Directrice, to be given to her when she awoke. For the girl of the Red Mill was determined to follow a plan of her own.
By rights she should be free until the next morning. There were twenty-four hours before her during which she need not report for service. Had she not learned of Tom’s trouble she doubtless would have taken a short nap and then appeared to help in any department where she might be of use.
But, to Ruth’s mind, Tom’s need was greater than anything else just then. In her walks about Clair she had become acquainted with a French girl who drove a motor-car—Henriette Dupay. Her father was one of the larger farmers, and the family lived in a beautiful old house some distance out of town. Ruth made a brief toilet, a briefer breakfast, and ran out of the hospital, taking the lane that led to the Dupay farm.
The fog was so thick close to the ground that she could not see people in the road until she was almost upon them. But, then, it was so early that not many even of the early-rising farmers were astir.
In addition, the night having been so racked with the sounds of the guns,—now dying out,thank heaven!-and the noise of the ambulances coming in from the front and returning thereto, that most of the inhabitants of Clair were exhausted and slept late.
The American girl, well wrapped in a cloak and with an automobile veil wound about her hat and pulled down to her ears, walked on hurriedly, stopping now and then at a crossroad to make sure she was on the right track.
If Henriette Dupay could get her father’s car, and would drive Ruth to Lyse, the latter would be able to assure herself about Tom one way or another. She felt that she must know just how badly the young fellow was wounded!
To think! An arm torn off at the elbow—if it was really Tom who had been picked up with the note Ruth had received in his pocket. It was dreadful to think of.
At one point in her swift walk Ruth found herself sobbing hysterically. Yet she was not a girl who broke down easily. Usually she was selfcontrolled. Helen accused her sometimes of being even phlegmatic.
She took a new grip upon herself. Her nerves must not get the best of her! It might not be Tom Cameron at all who was wounded. There were other American officers mixed in with the French troops on this sector of the battle front—surely!
Yet, who else but Tom would have carried that letter written to “Dear Ruth Fielding”? The more the girl of the Red Mill thought of it the more confident she was that there could have been no mistake made. Tom had fallen wounded in the trenches and was now in the big hospital at Lyse, where she had worked for some weeks in the ranks of the Red Cross recruits.
Suddenly the girl was halted by a voice in the fog. A shrill exclamation in a foreign tone—not French—sounded just ahead. It was a man’s voice, and a woman’s answered. The two seemed to be arguing; but to hear people talking in anything but French or English in this part of France was enough to astonish anybody.
“That is not German. It is a Latin tongue,” thought the girl, wonderingly. “Italian or Spanish, perhaps. Who can it be?”
She started forward again, yet walked softly, for the moss and short grass beside the road made her footfalls indistinguishable a few yards away. There loomed up ahead of her a wayside cross—one of those weather-worn and ancient monuments so often seen in that country.
In walking with Henriette Dupay, Ruth had seen the French girl kneel a moment at this junction of the two lanes, and whisper a prayer. Indeed, the American girl had followed her example, for she believed that God hears the reverentprayer wherever it is made. And Ruth had felt of late that she had much to pray for.
The voices of the two wrangling people suggested no worship, however. Nor were they kneeling at the wayside shrine. She saw them, at last, standing in the middle of the cross lane. One, she knew, had come down from the chateau.
Ruth saw that the woman was the heavy-faced creature whom she had once seen at the gateway of the chateau when riding past with Charlie Bragg. This strange-looking old woman Charlie had said was a servant of the countess up at the chateau and that she was not a Frenchwoman. Indeed, the countess herself was not really French, but was Alsatian, and “the wrong kind,” to use the chauffeur’s expression.
The American girl caught a glimpse of the woman’s face and then hid her own with her veil. But the man’s countenance she did not behold until she had passed the shrine and had looked back.
He had wheeled to look after Ruth. He was a small man and suddenly she saw, as he stepped out to trace her departure more clearly, that he was lame. He wore a heavy shoe on one foot with a thick and clumsy sole-such as the supposed Italian chef had worn coming over from America on the Red Cross ship.
Was it the man, José, suspected with Legrand and Mrs. Rose Mantel—all members of a band of conspirators pledged to rob the Red Cross? Ruth dared not halt for another glance at him. She pulled the veil further over her face and scuttled on up the lane toward the Dupay farmhouse.
Ruth reached the farmhouse just as the family was sitting down to breakfast. The house and outbuildings of the Dupays were all connected, as is the way in this part of France. No shell had fallen near the buildings, which was very fortunate, indeed.
Henriette’s father was a one-armed man. He had lost his left arm at the Marne, and had been honorably discharged, to go back to farming, in order to try to raise food for the army and for the suffering people of France. His two sons and his brothers were still away at the wars, so every child big enough to help, and the women of the family as well, aided in the farm work.
No petrol could be used to drive cars for pleasure; but Henriette sometimes had to go for supplies, or to carry things to market, or do other errands connected with the farm work. Ruth hoped that the French girl would be allowed to help her.
The hospitable Dupays insisted upon theAmerican girl’s sitting down to table with them. She was given a seat on the bench between Henriette and Jean, a lad of four, who looked shyly up at the visitor from under heavy brown lashes, and only played with his food.
It was not the usual French breakfast to which Ruth Fielding had become accustomed—coffee and bread, with possibly a little compote, or an egg. There was meat on the table—a heavy meal, for it was to be followed by long hours of heavy labor.
“What brings you out so early after this awful night?” Henriette whispered to her visitor.
Ruth told her. She could eat but little, she was so anxious about Tom Cameron. She made it plain to the interested French girl just why she so desired to follow on to Lyse and learn if it really was Tom who had been wounded, as the message on the blood-stained envelope said.
“I might start along the road and trust to some ambulance overtaking me,” Ruth explained. “But often there is a wounded man who can sit up riding on the seat with the driver—sometimes two. I could not take the place of such an unfortunate.”
“It would be much too far for you to walk, Mademoiselle,” said the mother, overhearing. “We can surely help you.”
She spoke to her husband—a huge man, ofwhom Ruth stood rather in awe, he was so stern-looking and taciturn. But Henriette said he had been a “laughing man” before his experience in the war. War had changed many people, this French girl said, nodding her head wisely.
“The venerable Countess Marchand,” pointing to the chateau on the hill, “had been neighborly and kind until the war came. Now she shut herself away from all the neighbors, and if a body went to the chateau it was only to be confronted by old Bessie, who was the countess’ housekeeper, and her only personal servant now.”
“Old Bessie,” Ruth judged, must be the hard-featured woman she had seen at the chateau gate and, on this particular morning, talking to the lame man at the wayside cross.
The American girl waited now in some trepidation for Dupay to speak. He seemed to consider the question of Ruth’s getting to Lyse quite seriously for some time; then he said quietly that he saw no objection to Henriette taking the sacks of grain to M. Naubeck in the touring car body instead of the truck, and going to-day to Lyse on that errand instead of the next week.
It was settled so easily. Henriette ran away to dress, while a younger brother slipped out to see that the car was in order for the two girls. Ruth knew she could not offer the Dupays any remuneration for the trouble they took for her,but she was so thankful to them that she was almost in tears when she and Henriette started for Lyse half an hour later.
“The main road is so cut up and rutted by the big lorries and ambulances that we would better go another way,” Henriette said, as she steered out of the farm lane into the wider road.
They turned away from Lyse, it seemed to Ruth; but, after circling around the hill on which the chateau stood, they entered a more traveled way, but one not so deeply rutted.
A mile beyond this point, and just as the motor-car came down a gentle slope to a small stream, crossed by a rustic bridge, the two girls spied another automobile, likewise headed toward Lyse. It was stalled, both wheels on the one side being deep in a muddy rut.
There were two men with the car—a small man and a much taller individual, who was dressed in the uniform of a French officer—a captain, as Ruth saw when they came nearer.
The little man stepped into the woods, perhaps for a sapling, with which to pry up the car, before the girls reached the bottom of the hill. At least, they only saw his back. But when Ruth gained a clear view of the officer’s face she was quite shocked.
“What is the matter?” Henriette asked her, driving carefully past the stalled car.
Ruth remained silent until they were across the bridge and the French girl had asked her question a second time, saying:
“What is it, Mademoiselle Ruth?”
“Do you know that man?” Ruth returned, proving herself a true Yankee by answering one question with another.
“The captain? No. I do not know him. There are many captains,” and Henriette laughed.
“He—he looks like somebody I know,” Ruth said hesitatingly. She did not wish to explain her sudden shocked feeling on seeing the man’s face. He looked like the shaven Legrand who, on the ship coming over and in Lyse, had called himself “Professor Perry.”
If this was the crook, who, Ruth believed, had set fire to the business office of the Robinsburg Red Cross headquarters, he had evidently not been arrested in connection with the supply department scandal, of which the matron of the hospital had told her. At least, he was now free. And the little fellow with him! Had not Ruth, less than two hours before, seen José talking with the woman from the chateau at the wayside shrine near Clair?
The mysteries of these two men and their disguises troubled Ruth Fielding vastly. It seemed that the prefect of police at Lyse had not apprehendedthem. Nor was Mrs. Mantel yet in the toils.
This was a longer way to Lyse by a number of miles than the main road; nevertheless, it was probable that the girls gained time by following the more roundabout route.
It was not yet noon when Henriette stopped at a side entrance to the hospital where Ruth had served her first few weeks for the Red Cross in France. The girl of the Red Mill sprang out, and, asking her friend to wait for her, ran into the building.
The guard remembered her, and nobody stopped her on the way to the reception office, where a record was kept of all the patients in the great building. The girl at the desk was a stranger to Ruth, but she answered the visitor’s questions as best she could.
She looked over the records of the wounded accepted from the battle front or from evacuation hospitals during the past forty-eight hours. There was no such name as Cameron on the list; and, as far as the clerk knew, no American at all among the number.
“Oh, theremustbe!” gasped Ruth, wringing her hands. “Surely there is a mistake. There is no other hospital here for him to be brought to, and I am sure this person was brought to Lyse. They say his arm is torn off at the elbow.”
A nurse passing through the office stopped and inquired in French of whom Ruth was speaking. The girl of the Red Mill explained.
“I believe we have theblesséin my ward,” this nurse said kindly. “Will you come and see, Mademoiselle? He has been quite out of his head, and perhaps he is an American, for he has not spoken French. We thought him English.”
“Oh, let me see him!” cried Ruth, and hastened with her into one of the wards where she knew the most serious cases were cared for.
Her fears almost overcame the girl. Her interest in Tom Cameron was deep and abiding. For years they had been friends, and now, of late, a stronger feeling than friendship had developed in her heart for Tom.
His courage, his cheerfulness, the real, solid worth of the young fellow, could not fail to endear him to one who knew him as well as did Ruth Fielding. If he had been shot down, mangled, injured, perhaps, to the very death!
How would Helen and their father feel if Tom was seriously wounded? If Ruth found him here in the hospital, should she immediately communicate with his twin sister in Paris, and with his father, who had doubtless reached the States by this time?
Her mind thus in a turmoil, she followed the nurse into the ward and down the aisle betweenthe rows of cots. She had helped comfort the wounded in this very ward when she worked in this hospital; but she looked now for no familiar face, save one. She looked ahead for the white, strained countenance of Tom Cameron against the coarse pillow-slip.
The nurse stopped beside a cot. Oh, the relief! There was no screen around it! The occupant was turned with his face away from the aisle. The stump of the uplifted arm on his left side, bandaged and padded, was uppermost.
“Tom!” breathed the girl of the Red Mill, holding back just a little and with a hand upon her breast.
It was a head of black hair upon the pillow. It might easily have been Tom Cameron. And in a moment Ruth was sure that he was an American from the very contour of his visage—but it wasnotTom!
“Oh! It’s not! It’s not!” she kept saying over and over to herself. And then she suddenly found herself sitting in a chair at the end of the ward and the nurse was saying to her:
“Are you about to faint, Mademoiselle? It is the friend you look for?”
“Oh, no! I sha’n’t faint,” Ruth declared, getting a grip upon her nerves again. “It is not my friend. Oh! I cannot tell you how relieved I am.”
“Ah, yes! I know,” sighed the Frenchwoman. “I have a father and a brother in our army and after every battle I fear until I hear from them. I am glad for your sake it is another than your friend. And yet—hewill have friends who suffer, too—is it not?”
Ruth Fielding felt as though she needed a cup of tea more than she ever had before in her life. And Clare Biggars had her own tea service in her room at the pension. Ruth had inquired for Clare and learned that this was a free hour for the Kansas girl. So Ruth and Henriette Dupay drove to the boarding-house; for to get a good cup of tea in one of the restaurants or cafés was impossible.
Her relief at learning the wounded American in the hospital was not Tom Cameron was quite overwhelming at first. Ruth had come out to the car so white of face that the French girl was frightened.
“Oh! Mam’zelle Fielding! It is that you haf los’ your friend?” cried the girl in the stammering English she tried so hard to make perfect.
“I don’t know that,” sighed Ruth. “But, at least, if he is wounded, he was not brought here to this hospital.”
She could not understand how that letter hadbeen found in the pocket of the young man she had seen in the hospital ward. Tom Cameron certainly had written that letter. Ruth would not be free from worry until she had heard again from Tom, or of him.
The pension was not far away, and Ruth made her friend lock the car and come in with her, for Clare was a hospitable soul and it was lunch time. To her surprise Ruth found Clare in tears.
“What is the matter, my dear girl?” cried Ruth, as Clare fled sobbing to her arms the moment she saw the girl of the Red Mill. “What can have happened to you?”
“Everything!” exploded the Kansas girl. “You can’t imagine! I’ve all but been arrested, and the Head called me down dreadfully, and Madame——”
“Madame Mantel?” Ruth asked sharply. “Is she the cause of your troubles? I should have warned you——”
“Oh, the poor dear!” groaned Clare. “She feels as bad about it as I do. Why, they took her to the police station, too!”
“You seem to have all been having a fine time,” Ruth said, rather tartly. “Tell me all about it. But ask us to sit down, anddogive us a cup of tea. This is Henriette Dupay, Clare, and a very nice girl she is. Try to be cordial—hold up the reputation of America, my dear.”
“How-do?” gulped Clare, giving the French girl her hand. “Iamglad Ruth brought you. But it was only yesterday——”
“What was only yesterday?” asked Ruth, as the hostess began to set out the tea things.
“Oh, Ruth! Haven’t you heard something about the awful thing that happened here? That Professor Perry——”
“Ah! What about him?” asked Ruth. “You know what I wrote you—that I had heard there was trouble in the Supply Department? You haven’t answered my letter.”
“No. I was too worried. And finally—only yesterday, as I said—I was ordered to appear before the prefect of police.”
“A nice old gentleman with a white mustache.”
“A horrid old man who said themeanestthings to dear Madame Mantel!” cried Clare hotly.
Ruth saw that the Western girl was still enamored of the woman in black, so she was careful what she said in comment upon Clare’s story.
All Ruth had to do was to keep still and Clare told it all. Perhaps Henriette did not understand very clearly what the trouble was, but she looked sympathetic, too, and that encouraged Clare.
It seemed that Mrs. Mantel had made a companion of Clare outside of the hospital, and Ruth could very well understand why. Clare’s fatherwas a member of Congress and a wealthy man. It was to be presumed that Clare seemed to the woman in black well worth cultivating.
The Kansas girl had gone with the woman to the café of the Chou-rouge more than once. Each time the so-called Professor Perry and the Italian commissioner, whose name Clare had forgotten—“But that’s of no consequence,” thought Ruth, “for he has so many names!”—had been very friendly with the Red Cross workers.
Then suddenly the professor and the Italian had disappeared. The head of the Lyse hospital had begun to make inquiries into the working of the Supply Department. There had been billed to Lyse great stores of goods that were not accounted for.
“Poor Madame Mantel was heartbroken,” Clare said. “She wished to resign at once. Oh, it’s been terrible!”
“Resign under fire?” suggested Ruth.
“Oh—you understand—she felt so bad that her department should be under suspicion. Of course, it was not her fault.”
“Did the head saythat?”
“Why, he didn’t have to!” cried Clare. “I hopeyouare not suspicious of Madame Mantel, Ruth Fielding?”
“You haven’t told me enough to cause me to suspect anybody yet—save yourself,” laughedRuth. “I suspect that you are telling the story very badly, my dear.”
“Well, I suppose that is so,” admitted Clare, and thereafter she tried to speak more connectedly about the trouble which had finally engrossed all her thought.
The French police had unearthed, it was said, a wide conspiracy for the diversion of Red Cross supplies from America to certain private hands. These goods had been signed for in Mrs. Mantel’s office; she did not know by whom, but the writing on the receipts was not in her hand. That was proved. And, of course, the goods had never been delivered to the hospital at Lyse.
The receipts must have been forged. The only point made against Mrs. Mantel, it seemed, was that she had not reported that these goods, long expected at Lyse, were not received. Her delay in making inquiry for the supplies gave the thieves opportunity for disposing of the goods and getting away with the money paid for them by dishonest French dealers.
The men who had disposed of the supplies and had pocketed the money (or so it was believed) were the man who called himself Professor Perry and the Italian commissioner.
“And what do you think?” Clare went on to say. “That professor is no college man at all. He is a well-known French crook, they say, andusually travels under the name of Legrand.
“They say he had been in America until it got too hot for him there, and he crossed on the same boat with us—you remember, Ruth?”
“Oh, I remember,” groaned the girl of the Red Mill. “The Italian, too?”
“I don’t know for sure about him. They say he isn’t an Italian, but a Mexican, anyway. And he has a police record in both hemispheres.
“Consider! Madame Mantel and I were seen hobnobbing with them! I know she feels just as I do. I hate to show myself on the street!”
“I wouldn’t feel that way,” Ruth replied soothingly. “You could not help it.”
“But the police—ordering me before that nasty old prefect!” exclaimed the angry girl. “And he said such things to me! Think! He had cabled the chief of police in my town to ask who I was and if I had a police record. What do you suppose my father will say?”
“I guarantee that he will laugh at you,” Ruth declared. “Don’t take it so much to heart. Remember we are in a strange country, and that that country is at war.”
“I never shall like the French system of government, just the same!” declared Clare, with emphasis.
“And—and what about Mrs. Mantel?” Ruth asked doubtfully.
“I am going over to see her now,” Clare said, wiping her eyes. “I am so sorry for her. I believe that horrid prefect thinks she is mixed up in the plot that has cost the Red Cross so much. They say nearly ten thousand dollars worth of goods was stolen, and those two horrid men—Professor Perry and the other—have got away and the French police cannot find them.”
Ruth was secretly much disturbed by Clare’s story. She believed that she knew something about the pair of crooks who were accused—Rose Mantel’s two friends—that might lead to their capture. She was sure Henriette Dupay and she had passed them with their stalled automobile on the road to Lyse that morning.
In addition, she believed the two crooks were connected with those people at the Chateau Marchand, who were supposed to be pro-German. Now she knew what language she had heard spoken by José and the hard-featured Bessie of the chateau, there by the wayside cross. It was Spanish. The woman might easily be a Mexican as well as José.
Should she go to the prefect of police and tell him of these things? It seemed to Ruth Fielding that she was much entangled in a conspiracy of wide significance. The crooks who had robbed the Red Cross seemed lined up with the spies of the Chateau Marchand.
And there was the strange animal—dog, or what-not!—that was connected with the chateau. The werwolf! Whether she believed in such traditional tales or not, the American girl was impressed with the fact that there was much that was suspicious in the whole affair.
Yet she naturally shrank from getting her own fingers caught in the cogs of this mystery that the French police were doubtless quite able to handle in their own way, and all in good time. It was evident that even Mrs. Mantel was not to be allowed to escape the police net. She had not been arrested yet; but she doubtless was watched so closely now that she could neither get away, nor aid in doing further harm.
As for Clare Biggars, she was perfectly innocent of all wrong-doing or intent. And she was quite old enough to take care of herself. Besides, her father would doubtless be warned that his daughter was under suspicion of the French police and he would communicate with the United States Ambassador at Paris. She would be quite safe and suffer no real trouble.
So Ruth decided to return to Clair without going to the police, and, after lunch, having delivered the bags of grain which had filled the tonneau of the car, she and Henriette Dupay drove out of town again.
They were delayed for some time by tire trouble, andthe French girl proved herself as good a mechanic as was necessary in repairing the tube. But night was falling before they were halfway home.
Ruth’s thoughts were divided between the conspiracy, in which Mrs. Mantel was engaged, and her worry regarding Tom Cameron. She had filed a telegraph message at the Lyse Hospital to be sent to Tom’s cantonment, where he was training, and hoped that the censor would allow it to go through. For she knew she could not be satisfied that Tom had not been wounded until she heard from him.
The American girl’s nerves had been shot through by the affair of the early morning, when the note from Tom had been brought to her. What had followed since that hour had not served to help her regain her self-control.
Therefore, as Henriette drove the car on through the twilight, following the road by which they had gone to Lyse, there was reason for Ruth suddenly exclaiming aloud, when she saw something in the track ahead:
“Henriette! Look! What can that be? Do you see it?”
“What do you see, Mademoiselle Ruth?” asked the French girl, reducing the speed of the car in apprehension.
“There! That white——”
“Nom de Dieu!” shrieked Henriette, getting sight of the object in question.
The girl paled visibly and shrank back into her seat. Ruth cried out, fearing the steering wheel would get away from Henriette.
“Oh! Did you see?” gasped the latter.
The white object had suddenly disappeared. It seemed to Ruth as though it had actually melted into thin air.
“That was the werwolf!” continued the French girl, and crossed herself. “Oh, my dear Mademoiselle, something is sure now to happen—something very bad!”
RUTH FIELDING had almost instantly identified the swiftly moving object in the road as the same that she had seen weeks before while riding with Charlie Bragg toward Clair. And yet she could not admit as true the assertion made both by the ambulance driver and the excited French girl.
To recognize the quickly disappearing creature as a werwolf—the beast-form of a human being, sold irrevocably to the Powers of Darkness—was quite too much for a sane American girl like Ruth Fielding!
“Why, Henriette!” she cried, “that is nothing but a dog.”
“A wolf, Mademoiselle. A werwolf, as I have told you. A very wicked thing.”
“There isn’t such a thing,” declared Ruth bluntly. “That was a dog—a white or a gray one. And of large size. I have seen it once before—perhaps twice,” Ruth added, remembering the glimpse she had caught of such a creature with Bessie at the chateau gate.
“Oh, it is such bad fortune to see it!” sighed Henriette.
“Don’t be so childish,” Ruth adjured, brusquely. “Nothing about that dog can hurt you. But I have an idea the poor creature may be doing the French cause harm.”
“Oh, Mademoiselle! You have heard the vile talk about the dear countess!” cried Henriette. “It is not so. She is a brave and lovely lady. She gives her all for France. She would be filled with horror if she knew anybody connected her with the spies ofles Boches.”
“I thought it was generally believed that she was an Alsatianof the wrong kind.”
“It is a wicked calumny,” Henriette declared earnestly. “But I have heard the tale of the werwolf ever since I was a child—long before this dreadful war began.”
“Yes?”
“It was often seen racing through the country by night,” the girl declared earnestly. “They say it comes from the chateau, and goes back to it. But that the lovely countess is a wicked one, and changes herself into a devouring wolf—ah, no, no, Mademoiselle! It is impossible!
“The werwolf comes and goes across the battle front, it is said. Indeed, it used to cross the old frontier into Germany in pre-war times. Why may not some wicked German womanchange herself into a wolf and course the woods and fields at night? Why lay such a thing to the good Countess Marchand?”
Ruth saw that the girl was very much in earnest, and she cast no further doubt upon the occupant of the chateau, the towers of which had been in sight in the twilight for some few minutes. Henriette was now driving slowly and had not recovered from her fright. They came to a road which turned up the hill.
“Where does that track lead?” Ruth asked quickly.
“Past the gates of the chateau, Mademoiselle.”
“You say you will take me to the hospital at Clair before going home,” Ruth urged. “Can we not take this turn?”
“But surely,” agreed Henriette, and steered the car into the narrow and well-kept lane.
Ruth made no explanation for her request. But she felt sure that the object which had startled them both, dog or whatever it was, had dived into this lane to disappear so quickly. The “werwolf” was going toward the chateau on this evening instead of away from it.
There was close connection between the two criminals, who had come from America on the Red Cross steamship, Legrand and José, with whatever was going on between the Chateau Marchand and the Germans. Werwolf, or despatch dog,Ruth was confident that the creature that ran by night across the shell-racked fields was trained to spy work.
Who was guilty at the chateau? That seemed to be an open question.
Henriette’s declaration that it was not the Countess Marchand, strengthened the suspicion already rife in Ruth’s mind that the old servant, Bessie, was the German-lover.
The latter was known to José, one of the crooks from America. She might easily be of the same nationality as José—Mexican. And the Mexicans largely are pro-German.
José and Legrand were already under suspicion of a huge swindle in Red Cross stores. It would seem that if these men would steal, it was fair to presume they would betray the French Government for money.
It was a mixed-up and doubtful situation at best. Ruth Fielding intuitively felt that she had hold of the ends of certain threads of evidence that must, in time, lead to the unraveling of the whole scheme of deceit and intrigue.
It was still light enough on the upland for the girls to see some distance along the road ahead. Henriette drove the car slowly as they approached the wide gateway of the chateau.
Ruth distinguished the flutter of something white by the gate and wondered if it was the“werwolf” or the old serving woman. But when she called Henriette’s attention to the moving object the French girl cried, under her breath:
“Oh! It is the countess! Look you, Mademoiselle Ruth, perhaps she will speak to us.”
“But there’s something with her. Itisa dog,” the American girl declared.
“Why that is only Bubu, the old hound. He is always with the countess when she walks out. He is a greyhound—see you? It is foolish, Mademoiselle, to connect Bubu with the werwolf,” and she shrugged her plump shoulders.
Ruth paid more attention to the dog at first than she did to the lady who held the loop of his leash. He wore a dark blanket, which covered most of his body, even to his ears. His legs were long, of course, and Ruth discovered another thing in a moment, while the car rolled nearer.
The thin legs of the slate-colored beast were covered with mud. That mud was not yet dry. The dog had been running at large within the last few minutes, the girl was sure.
The query that came sharply to Ruth Fielding’s mind was: Without his blanket and off his leash, what would Bubu, the greyhound, look like in the gloaming? The next moment the tall old lady walking by the observant dog’s side, raised her hand and nodded to Henriette.
“Oh, Madame!” gasped the French girl, and brought the car to an instant stop.
“I thought it was my little Hetty,” the countess said in French, and smiling. “Hast been to Lyse for the good father?”
“Yes, Madame,” replied the girl.
“And what news do you bring?”
The voice of the old lady was very kind. Ruth, watching her closely, thought that if the Countess Marchand was a spy for Germany, and was wicked at heart, she was a wonderfully good actress.
She had a most graceful carriage. Her hair, which was snow white, was dressed most becomingly. Her cheeks were naturally pink; yet herthroat and under her chin the skin was like old ivory and much wrinkled. She was dressed plainly, although the cape about her shoulders was trimmed with expensive fur.
Henriette replied to her queries bashfully, bobbing her head at every reply. She was much impressed by the lady’s attention. Finally the latter looked full at Ruth, and asked:
“Your friend is from the hospital, Hetty?”
“Oh, yes, Madame!” Henriette hastened to say. “She is anAmericaine. Of the Red Cross.”
“I could imagine her nativity,” said the countess, bowing to Ruth, and with cordiality. “I traveled much with the count—years ago. All over America. I deem all Americans my friends.”
“Thank you, Madame,” replied Ruth gravely.
At the moment the stern-faced Bessie came through the little postern gate. She approached the countess and stood for a moment respectfully waiting her mistress’ attention.
“Ah, here is the good Bessie,” said the countess, and passed the serving woman the loop of the dog’s leather leash. “Take him away, Bessie. Naughty Bubu! Do you know, he should be punished—and punished severely. He had slipped his collar again. See his legs? You must draw the collar up another hole, Bessie.”
The harsh voice of the old woman replied, butRuth could not understand what she said. The dog was led away; but Ruth saw that Bessie stared at her, Ruth, curiously—or was it threateningly?
The countess turned again to speak to the two girls. “Old Bessie comes from America, Mademoiselle,” she explained. “I brought her over years ago. She has long served me.”
“She comes from Mexico, does she not?” Ruth asked quietly.
“Yes. I see you have bright eyes—you are observant,” said the countess. “Yes. Mexico was Bessie’s birthplace, although she is not all Spanish.”
Ruth thought to herself: “I could guarantee that. She is part German. ‘Elizabeth’—yes, indeed! And does this lady never suspect what her serving woman may be?”
The countess dismissed them with another kindly word and gesture. Henriette was very much wrought up over the incident.
“She is a great lady,” she whispered to Ruth. “Wait till I tell my father and mother how she spoke to me. They will be delighted.”
“And this is a republic!” smiled Ruth. Even mild toadyism did not much please this American girl. “Still,” she thought, “we are inclined to bow down and worship a less worthy aristocracy at home—the aristocracy of wealth.”
Henriette ran her down to the town and to the hospital gate. Ruth was more than tired—she felt exhausted when she got out of the car. But she saw the matron before retiring to her own cell for a few hours’ sleep.
“We shall need you, Mademoiselle,” the Frenchwoman said distractedly. “Oh! so many poor men are here. They have been bringing them in all day. There is a lull on the front, or I do not know what we should do. The poor, poor men!”
Ruth had to rest for a while, however, although she did not sleep. Her mind was too painfully active.
Her thoughts drummed continually upon two subjects, the mystery regarding Tom Cameron—his letter to her found in another man’s pocket. Secondly, the complications of the plot in which the woman in black, the two crooks from America, and the occupants of the chateau seemed all entangled.
She hoped hourly to hear from Tom; but no word came. She wished, indeed, that she might even see Charlie Bragg again; but nobody seemed to have seen him about the hospital of late. The ambulance corps was shifted around so frequently that there was no knowing where he could be found, save at his headquarters up near the front. And Ruth Fielding felt that she was quite as nearthe front here at Clair as she ever wished to be!
She went on duty before midnight and remained at work until after supper the next evening. She had nothing to do with the severely wounded, of course; but there was plenty to do for those who had already been in the hospital some time, and whom she knew.
Ruth could aid them in simple matters, could read to them, write for them, quiet them if they were nervous or suffering from shell-shock. She tried to forget her personal anxieties in attending to the poor fellows and aiding them to forget their wounds, if for only a little while.
But she climbed to her cell at last, worn out as she was by the long strain, with a determination to communicate with the French police-head in Lyse regarding the men who had robbed the Red Cross supply department.
She wrote the letter with the deliberate intention of laying all the mystery, as she saw it, before the authorities. She would protect the woman in black no longer. Nor did she ignore the possibility of the Countess Marchand and her old serving woman being in some way connected with Legrand and José, the Mexican.
She lay bare the fact that the two men from America had been in a plot to rob the Red Cross at Robinsburg, and how they had accomplished their ends with the connivance (as Ruth believed) ofRose Mantel. She spared none of the particulars of this early incident.
She wrote that she had seen the man, José, in his character of the lame Italian, both on the steamship coming over, in Paris, and again here at Clair talking with the Mexican servant of the Countess Marchand. Legrand, too, she mentioned as being in the neighborhood of Clair, now dressed as a captain of infantry in the French army.
She quite realized what she was doing in writing all this. Legrand, for instance, risked death as a spy in any case if he represented himself as an officer. But Ruth felt that the matter was serious. Something very bad was going on here, she was positive.
The only thing she could not bring herself to tell of was the suspicions she had regarding the identity of the “werwolf,” as the superstitious country people called the shadowy animal that raced the fields and roads by night, going to and coming from the battle front.
It seemed such a silly thing—to repeat such gossip of the country side to the police authorities! She could not bring herself to do it. If the occupants of the chateau were suspected of being disloyal, what Ruth had already written, connecting José with Bessie, would be sufficient.
She wrote and despatched this letter at once.She knew it would be unopened by the local censor because of the address upon it. Communications to the police were privileged.
Ruth wondered much what the outcome of this step would be. She shrank from being drawn into a police investigation; but the matter had gone so far now and was so serious that she could not dodge her duty.
That very next day word was sent in to Ruth from the guard at the entrance whom she had tipped for that purpose, that the American ambulance driver, Monsieur Bragg, was at the door.
When Ruth hastened to the court thebrancardiershad shuffled in with the last of Charlie’s “load” and he was cranking up his car. The latter looked as though it had been through No Man’s Land, clear to the Boche “ditches” it was so battered and mud-bespattered. Charlie himself had a bandage around his head which looked like an Afghan’s turban.
“Oh, my dear boy! Are you hurt?” Ruth gasped, running down the steps to him.
“No,” grunted the young ambulance driver. “Got this as an order of merit. For special bravery in the performance of duty,” and he grinned. “Gosh! I can’t get hurt proper. I bumped my head on a beam in the park—pretty near cracked my skull, now I tell you! Say! How’s your friend?”
“That is exactly what I don’t know,” Ruth hastened to tell him.
“How’s that? Didn’t you go to Lyse?”
“Yes. But the man in whose pocket that letter to me was found isn’t Tom Cameron at all. It was some one else!”
“What? You don’t mean it! Then how did he come by that letter? I saw it taken out of the poor chap’s pocket. Johnny Mall wrote the note to you on the outside of it. I knew it was intended for you, of course.”
“But the man isn’t Tom. I should say, Lieutenant Thomas Cameron.”
“Seems to me I’ve heard of that fellow,” ruminated the ambulance driver, removing his big spectacles to wipe them. “But I believe heiswounded. I’m sorry,” he added, as he saw the change in Ruth’s face. “Maybe he isn’t, after all. Is—is this chap a pretty close friend of yours?”
Ruth told him, somewhat brokenly, in truth, just how near and dear to her the Cameron twins were. Telling more, perhaps, in the case of Tom, than she intended.
“I’ll see what I can find out about him. He’s been in this sector, I believe,” he said. “I guess he has been at our headquarters up yonder and I’ve met him.
“Well, so long,” he added, hopping into hiscar. “Next time I’m back this way maybe I’ll have some news for you—goodnews.”
“Oh, I hope so!” murmured Ruth, watching the battered ambulance wheel out of the hospital court.
Henriette Dupay had an errand in the village the next day and came to see Ruth, too. The little French girl was very much excited.
“Oh, my dear Mademoiselle Ruth!” she cried. “What do you think?”
“I could not possibly think—foryou,” smiled Ruth.
“It is so—just as I told you,” wailed the other girl. “It always happens.”
“Do tell me what you mean? What has happened now?”
“Something bad always follows the seeing of the werwolf. My grandmère says it is a curse on the neighborhood because many of our people neglect the church. Think!”
“Do tell me,” begged the American girl.
“Our best cow died,” cried Henriette. “Our—ve-ry—best—cow! It is an affliction, Mademoiselle.”
Ruth could well understand that to be so, for cows, since the German invasion, have been very scarce in this part of France. Henriette was quite confident that the appearance of the “werwolf” had foretold the demise of “the poorLally.” The American girl saw that it was quite useless to seek to change her little friend’s opinion on that score.
“Of course, the thing we saw in the road could not have been the countess’ dog?” she ventured.
But Henriette would have none of that. “Why, Bubu’s blanket is black,” she cried. “And you know the werwolf is all of a white color—and so hu-u-uge!”
She would have nothing of the idea that Bubu was the basis of the countryside superstition. But the French girl had a second exciting bit of news.
“Think you!” she cried, “what I saw coming over to town this ve-ry day, Mademoiselle Ruth.”
“Another mystery?”
“Quite so. But yes. You would never, as you say, ‘guess.’ I passed old Bessie, Madame la Countess’ serving woman, riding fast,fastin a motor-car. Is it not a wonder?”
The statement startled Ruth, but she hid her emotion, asking:
“Not alone—surely? You do not mean that that old woman drives the countess’ car?”
“Oh, no, Mademoiselle. The countess has no car. This was the strange car you and I saw on the road that day—the one that was stalled in the rut. You remember the tall capitaine—and the little one?”
The shock of the French girl’s statement was almost too much for Ruth’s self-control. Her voice sounded husky in her own ears when she asked:
“Tell me, Henriette! Are yousure? The old woman was riding away with those two men?”
“But yes, Mademoiselle. And they drive fast, fast!” and she pointed east, away from the hospital, and away from the road which led to Lyse.